Introduction

Hey there, I hope you’re doing well. Generally, you all are familiar with the term ‘Software’. But, do you know about the features/qualities of software products? In this blog, you’re gonna read about the ‘8 qualities of software product’.

Let’s get started….

The Goal of any engineering activity is to build the product. The product of software engineering is a software system but the difference between the software products and other products is that it is modifiable. The user wants the software product to be reliable and user-friendly. The designer of the software wants it to be maintainable and portable.

8 Qualities of Software Product:

  • Correctness: A program is functionally correct if it behaves according to the specification of the functions it should provide (called functional requirement specifications). The definition of correctness assumes that a specification of the system is available and that it is possible to determine unambiguously whether or not a program meets the specifications. Correctness is a mathematical property that establishes the equivalence between the software and its specification.
  • Reliability: Software is reliable if the user can depend on it. The notion of reliability is, on the other hand, relative; if the consequence of a software error is not serious, the incorrect software may still be reliable. Software products are commonly released along with a list of known bugs. Users of software take it for granted that release one of the product is buggy. This is one of the most striking symptoms of the immaturity of the software engineering field as an engineering discipline.
    Generally, users treat Software design errors as unavoidable. Whereas with all other products the customers receive a guarantee of reliability, with the software we get a disclaimer that the software manufacturer is not responsible for any damages due to product errors. We can truly call Software engineering as an engineering discipline only when we can achieve software reliability comparable to the reliability of other engineering products.
  • Robustness: A Program is robust if it behaves reasonably, even in circumstances that were not anticipated in the requirement specification- for example, when it encounters incorrect input data or some hardware malfunction. Robustness and correctness are strongly related without a sharp dividing line between them.

Additional Qualities of Software Product

  • User Friendliness: A Software system is user-friendly if its human users find it easy to use. This definition reflects the subjective nature of user-friendliness. A novice programmer’s application qualifies as user-friendly by virtue of different properties than an expert programmer’s application.
    For example, an invoice user may appreciate verbose messages, while an experienced user grows to detest and ignore them. Similarly, a nonprogrammer may appreciate the use of menus, while a programmer may be more comfortable with typing commands.
  • Maintainability: People use Software maintenance to refer to the modifications, that are made to software at any time according to the user’s requirement or to fix bugs. Usually, maintenance cost exceeds 60percent of the total costs of software. On the basis of the type of modification done, the three categories of maintenance costs are: corrective, adaptive, and perfection.
  • Verifiability: A software system is verifiable if its properties can be verified easily. We can perform Verification either by formal analysis methods or through testing. Verifiability is usually an internal quality, although it sometimes becomes an external quality also.
  • Reusability: Reusability appears to be more applicable to software components than to whole products but it certainly seems possible to build products that are reusable.
  • Portability: Basically, Software is portable if it can run in different environments. The term environment can refer to a hardware platform or a software environment such as a particular operating system. Portability refers to the ability to run a system on different hardware platforms.

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Blog by: Mr. Sachin Bagoria

Department of Information Technology

Biyani Group of Colleges, Jaipur

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